Tag: Opinion

Back in October last year, I posted a couple of articles around my recommendations and use of Two-Factor authentication. (Here’s part 1 and part 2 for those articles, if you’re interested in reading them.)

In my part 2 post, I indicated that I was also using a password manager and was using LastPass at the time. I have recently switched to 1Password and after posting a couple of things about that on Twitter, a few friends and followers expressed interest in knowing more about why I switched and how I would compare the two of them.

It’s January, which means we’re coming to the end of another contribution year for those of us Microsoft MVPs that are up for renewal on July 1st. By the end of March, we need to have submitted our contributions, and new this year, answered the four magic questions on the MVP site.

I have had the Surface Go for just over 1 week now. I had been interested in it since it came out and did a lot of research on my recent trip to Fargo comparing US prices vs. CAD prices and comparing the “unique” build configuration that Costco was selling vs. what everyone else had.

I arrived on Saturday morning, with very little trouble, except some minor stress of believing I might have been bumped from the 2nd leg of my flights to Fargo. It turns out, if you book in a low enough class of ticket, you aren’t assigned a seat until you are at the gate in the airport. No choice of seats, you get what you get and you’re technically on standby until then and could get bumped. Fortunately, I did not, but next time I may not be going for the absolute cheapest fare I can find.

This post was somewhat hard to write, to find the right tone, to express my feelings succinctly enough without seeming ungrateful for what I’ve just been awarded.

Yesterday, I received the official news from Microsoft that I had been awarded with an MVP Award for the 2018/2019 period, my first “renewal”. Leading up to yesterday, there were a tremendous amount of messages, emails and social media threads among the various channels that MVPs communicate in (some official, some not) where people were announcing they weren’t getting renewed. Included in this were several within my own award category, Business Solutions, within my own peer group of those focusing on Dynamics GP.

At the end of April, I thought I would do an experiment. I kept track of nearly every email that I received as a part of the MVP program for the entire month of May. I deleted nothing. However, some emails such as calendar invites are auto-deleted in Outlook once you accept or decline the invitation, so I may be missing a few. (I know you can change that behaviour in Outlook but I didn’t want to change my normal settings for the sake of an experiment!)

As a Microsoft MVP, depending on how many Distribution Lists (DLs) you subscribe you, you may get a LOT of emails. I was curious to keep track of exactly how many on a random month. May was that month!

There is no “one” reference point since every MVP will customize what DLs they subscribe to, if any, and what other forms of communications their product group prefers to use. For this post, my reference point, I subscribe to 2 DL’s in Business Solutions, which for the sake of NDA I will call “the primary one” we are all told we should follow and one for my own product group, Dynamics GP. Those in Business Solutions will know what I mean.

There are 7 different DLs in Business Solutions, not including ones marked as “Retired”. I also subscribe to 1 Data Platform DL, out of 16 in that award category. There is absolutely no way to effectively keep up with the information if I chose to subscribe to more, let alone what I already subscribe to, so, I must limit myself to a handful of DLs to keep sane!

When we receive the Microsoft MVP Award, the first thing after “accepting” the award officially is signing a non-disclosure agreement (NDA). Each time our award is renewed, we must acknowledge, accept and sign it again.

That NDA is an individual agreement between Microsoft and ourselves as an individual, not our company or employer, not our family, but us, individually. Additionally, even though all MVPs have signed the NDA agreement, we are not to share NDA information with other MVPs without pre-approval or through authorized NDA channels. I’m getting this part verbatim from the MVP site, by the way, to avoid mistakenly describing something in my own words that aren’t precisely true.

After the Collaborate Canada Toronto 2017 event, I had posted a poll on the GPUG Toronto Chapter forum to attempt to gauge, via an informal (& unofficial) poll, why the attendance was so low in Toronto that day. The premise of my poll was to attempt to reach some of the 480+ members listed in this chapter to determine why only 30 or so people attended the GP portion of the Toronto event.

A couple of people pointed out that many of the “members” in that 480+ number are not in the GTA. Some join because it’s one of the few chapters in Canada to get and post Canadian content. There appears to be an issue with chapter registration itself as others mentioned that several on the Toronto forum are actually in Montreal but cannot seem to save their default chapter to Montreal. Several on the list are members of many forums and don’t even live in Canada and some are Dynamics Communities people themselves. I suspect though, the vast majority of those on the list still should fit in my criteria generally of “customers within driving distance of an event in Toronto”. Continue reading “Collaborate Canada 2017 Follow Up”

Following up on GPUG Summit last week, I thought it would be timely to write a blog to encourage others to get involved in presenting in the future! Organizers are always looking for more people to fill presentation time slots.